Victoria Yau: Mountain Cloud

Victoria Yau: Mountain Cloud is a solo exhibition curated by Dr. Ellen Huang, Ph.D, former visiting scholar at Stanford’s Center for East Asian Studies and associate professor of art history and material culture at Art Center College of Design. Shanghai-born artist Victoria Yau (1939-2023) was one of the earliest Asian-American contemporary abstract artists, painting from the late 1950s to the late 2010s. Yau’s oeuvre has been rediscovered posthumously thanks to the archiving and preservation efforts of her son, Philip Yau, and the in-depth research of curator Ellen Huang with graduate student Beryl Zhou. This exhibition seeks to reconsider her work as part of the broader context of postwar art history, highlighting the complexities of her transnational journey and her contributions to the history of modern art. Spanning over half a century of art-making in disparate locations of Chicago, Florida, Phoenix, and New York, Yau’s abstraction and material experimentation invite us to consider transformations in East Asian landscape painting from painted compositions to a distillation of form and line. On view at Qualia are a selection of works that showcase Yau’s “mountain clouds,” the artist’s reworking of the historical term for landscape, “mountain-water 山水 (shanshui).” Her monoprints, watercolor collages, and ink works present landscapes in their most reduced, elemental forms. During the later years of Yau’s life, she returned to working with ink and further expanded her process of abstraction by engaging with material chance and effect. The interaction of ink and paper creates physical wrinkles that add a sense of movement along a diagonal in her waterscapes, rockscapes, and depictions of other natural effects. The artist’s multifaceted practice, shaped by her diasporic experience and multiple cultural influences, illuminates the significance of multilingualism in the development of early Asian American and Asian diasporic art, as well as in global modernism. This exhibition seeks to reconsider her work as part of the broader context of postwar art history, highlighting the complexities of her transnational journey and her contributions to the history of modern art.

Adapted from Dr. Ellen Huang's "Curator Essay," originally published on December 19, 2024.